Bücher der Reihe Cognitive Approaches to Culture

Eternalized Fragments explores the implications of treating literature as art-examining the evolving nature of aesthetic inquiry in literary studies, with an eye to how twentieth- and twenty-first-century world fiction challenges our understandings of form, pleasure, ethics, and other critical concepts traditionally associated with the study of aesthetics. Since postmodern and contemporary fiction tend to be dominated by disjunctures, paradoxes, and incongruities, this book offers an account of how and why readers choose to engage regardless, articulating the cognitive rewards such difficulties offer. By putting narrative and philosophical approaches in conversation with evolutionary psychology and contemporary neuroscience, W. Michelle Wang examines the value of attending to aesthetic experiences when we read literature and effectively demonstrates that despite the aesthetic's stumble in time, our ongoing love affair with fiction is grounded in our cognitive engagements with the text's aesthetic dimensions. Drawing on a diverse range of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy,Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Italo Calvino, Flann O'Brien, and Alasdair Gray, Eternalized Fragments lucidly renders the aesthetic energies at work in the novels' rich potentialities of play, the sublime's invitation to affective renegotiations, and beauty's polysemy in shaping readerly capacities for nuance.

In Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind's original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson's forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience-and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott-Romanticism's Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.